Azer in Arabic means friendly, ready to assist and lend a hand. This multilingual typeface combines simple lines with careful detailing to create a serious but approachable look. The Arabic is a Naskh / Kufi hybrid and retains a balance between calligraphic angular cuts and unadorned construction. The Latin is a humanist sans-serif with crisp cuts based on the broad nip pen calligraphic structure and contemporary outlines. The fonts include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Latin variants. Azer is available in five weights, ranging from a delicate thin ideal for refined headlines to a thick black perfect for chunky titles and in-text emphasis.

Where Arabic typefaces have a strong horizontal structure because of baseline letter connections, Latin typefaces have a vertical rhythm because of an upright stem structure present in most glyphs. To resolve this discrepancy, Azer Latin was drawn with conic shaped stems, inspired by the Arabic Alef glyph. The thirty-degree angle of the broad nib pen increases the horizontal stress of the Latin letters, which brings the overall color of the Latin text closer to the Arabic Text.

The Arabic and the Latin mirror each other's appearances much like fraternal twins with compatible attitudes. Azer Latin is earnest and sincere; Azer Arabic is direct and austere.

The Naskh calligraphic style of the Arabic variant is complemented by a calligraphic broad nip pen technique in the Latin, creating strong pen strokes: crisp broken cuts with open and fluid letter structure.
_
Designed with Pascal Zoghbi and Ian Party"

Each letter of the Latin alphabet is assigned a drawing of a tree from the NYC Parks Department’s existing native and non-native trees, as well as species that are to be planted as a result of the changing climate. For example, A = Ash.

Everyone is invited to download the free font, NYC Trees, and to write words, poems, messages, or love letters, in Trees. We’ll select some of these messages to plant with real trees around the city. JOIN US! *

The New York City Tree Alphabet is an alphabetical planting palette, allowing us to rewrite the urban landscape by planting messages around the city with real trees. What messages would you like to see planted?

Back Story: While still a student at the London College of Communication, graphic designer Natasha Lucas began designing Bisect as a part of a larger project based on Harold Pinter’s mid-career “memory plays.” In a memory play, a lead character narrates events drawn from memories that may or may not be factually accurate. Pinter’s Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978) question how faulty memory and false perception lead us to harmful conclusions and personal betrayals.

Lucas developed the Bisect type system as a visual expression of the progressive fragmentation of language as it erodes through the selective, faulty nature of memory. At the same time, she wanted to create a coherent visual type system that would work across a range of print and digital media. She developed a subtly modulated grid for the construction of Bisect’s letterforms, governed by a playful exchange between separate segments. Subsequently, MuirMcNeil developed a full character set and cut Bisect in three versions.

Why’s it called Bisect? The word bisect means “to divide into two usually equal parts,” and this typeface does just that with its letterforms, carving each one into vertical and horizontal segments that register precisely with one another in layers to offer a wide range of visual possibilities.

What are its distinguishing characteristics? Bisect is a monospaced geometric type system, and all its letters occupy squares. The designer constructed the letterforms using a meticulous, subtle relationship of vertical, horizontal, and curved segments along with extremely tight letter spacing. The characters look as if they’re formed from Modernist ribbons, with well-deployed uses of negative space; the P, for instance, does not have a completed stroke for its spine and verges on the abstract, yet somehow maintains its integrity and legibility as a letter. Bisect is available in Opentype encoding for Macintosh.

What should I use it for? Just ask Paul McNeil, partner in the foundry bearing his name: “Big settings/strong settings/short settings/brand identity designs/posters/typographic animations/play/fun/exploration.”

What other typefaces do you like to pair it with? “We don’t. The notion of ‘font pairing’ brings us out in a rash—but Bisect contrasts well with just about anything,” says McNeil. Skin ailments aside, geometric sans serifs such as London are logical companions thanks to their visually obvious mathematical roots. "

"A font viewer app that helps designers choose a typeface for their project from a variety of different fonts. While at the desk, on the go or during lunch. Now fonts for iOS (system-installed), Google Edition(fonts at Google Fonts), and Font Awesome are available."

"A slew of recently released “dyslexic friendly” fonts claim to aid those with the learning disability, but has the research been properly tested?"

…

"Reading the testimonials of multiple dyslexic-friendly fonts, one might wonder, what’s the harm in trying them? While more research still needs to be done, at the very least, good can certainly come from the placebo effect.

I remember once babysitting a young dyslexic girl when I was a student; she’d been given colorful transparent paper to help her read. (The use of colorful lenses is another disputed technique in research on dyslexia.) She turned to me as we were reading and said she found that with orange, the words felt “less scary.”

Maybe these fonts, which are so agile and playful to look at, communicate an atmosphere of ease and kindness to a struggling reader, making the activity feel less severe and frightening. The fonts might not be actively helping someone read quicker or with greater ease, but they could help lessen feelings of fear and stress associated with the activity. They are a “preference,” but a preference with emotional and psychological implications.

The idea that dyslexia might be helped, even minutely, with a quick font-change, detracts from the severity and seriousness of a diagnoses.

We need to see dyslexic friendly fonts for what they are: a font change that shifts the personality of the letters, but doesn’t necessarily affect reading performance. The personal benefits of possible placebo effects need to be weighed against bigger concerns, though. As Eden says: “The potential of these fonts as highlighted by the press is misleading, and it takes away from the graveness of the situation.”

The idea that dyslexia might be helped, even minutely, with a quick font-change, detracts from the severity and seriousness of a diagnoses, and the fact that parents and schools must dedicate extra time and effort for improvement.

This is not to discourage people to continue designing for disability and access. Rather, it’s a call for more rigorous testing for these fonts, on par with the peer review studies that any other research around learning disabilities would go through. Testing pushes research into new corners, sets higher standards, and encourages interest and funding in the field.

Otherwise, what are we doing as an industry when we give out awards before having proof of concept? When we write articles because its a good story, without knowing if the story holds? The process is one that might actually harm those that a design claims to help—ultimately making the world a little less accessible in turn."

"Avería ("breakdown" or "mechanical damage" in Spanish - related to the root of the English word "average") is a Unicode typeface superfamily created from the average of all fonts on the computer of the creator, Dan Sayers. The process is described at iotic.com/averia. All metrics are the result of an averaging process. The included glyphs are those that existed in a majority of the source fonts.

The Averia Libre families of fonts are based on the average of all 725 fonts in the Google Web Fonts project, released under the SIL Open Font License, as of 9 Nov 2011.

Averia Serif Libre exists in 6 styles, and there are also the Averia Libre, Averia Sans Libre and Averia Gruesa Libre families.

For more information please visit the Avería page on the iotic website or send an email to Dan Sayers."

"Wakamai Fondue is a tool that answers the question “What can my font do?”

Drop a font on it, or click the circle to upload one, and Wakamai Fondue will tell you about the features in the font. It will also give you all the CSS needed to actually use these features in your web projects!

Everything is processed inside the browser—your font will not be sent to a server!

A big thank you to these amazing folks for their advice, encouragement and time:

Made by Roel Nieskens/PixelAmbacht using Fontkit and Vue.js . The logo is set in Eckmannpsych from OH no Type Co. The rest of the site uses your default OS system font by... I don’t know. Drop it here and find out!"

"I design the most beautiful products. Before scrolling down to the pictures, please read our Codes of Practice:

1. Wear the uniform
2. Think long term (like 30 years from now)
3. Build stories and languages, not things
4. Create your own universe (or join ours)
5. Collect samples
6. Be a sample for somebody else
7. Look for loyalty, not for a skill set
8. Do not build utilitarian products. However, use them as a medium to express yourself
9. Do not exploit introverts — doesn't work long term. Learn to be an introvert yourself
10. Travel more
11. Do not work for corporations. Old corporations were meaningful when their founders were alive, but now, they have outlived their relevancy. They exist only to keep their numbers growing
12. New corporations are no better. They have scaled up features, and today’s founders want hyper-growth for growth’s sake (it seems like every line of code, every feature deserves its own corporation — it sure doesn't)
13. So, fuck the corporations
14. Tell the truth (bullshit never works long term)
15. Study and research fashion
16. Your phone is a temporary feature — don’t spend your life on it (like you wouldn’t spend it on a fax machine)
17. Fuck likes, followers, fake lives, fake friends
18. Remake your environment. Build it for yourself, and people will come
19. Only trust those who make things you love
20. Move to LA
21. Don’t buy property
22. Don’t go to Mars (just yet)
23. Use only one font, just a few colors, and just a few shapes
24. Use spreadsheets, but only to map out 30 cells — one for each year of the rest of your life
25. The next three are the most important
26. The past doesn’t exist — don’t get stuck in it
27. Don’t go to Silicon Valley (it’s not for you if you’re still reading this)
28. Remind yourself daily: you and everyone you know will die
29. We must build the most beautiful things
30. We are 2046 kids"

[via Warren Ellis's Orbital Operations newsletter, 8 April 2018:

"LOT 2046 [https://www.lot2046.com/ ] continues to be magnificent. This is actually a really strong duffel bag. You just never know what you're going to get.

Incidentally, culture watchers, keep an eye on this - the LOT 2046 user-in-residence programme [https://www.lot2046.com/360/11/875c4f ]. This feels like a small start to a significant idea. Vadik thinks long-term. He once had the following Codes Of Practise list from his previous business on his personal website, preserved by the sainted Wayback Machine:"]

"Earlier this month Bram Stein published a book, along with the fine folks at A Book Apart, called The Webfont Handbook and it’s all about how browsers interpret our design choices when it comes to typography. Bram explores what fonts are and how they load, along with the unfamiliar CSS properties that we can use to control them.

You might not care one single iota about fonts or how browsers interact with them, and that’s totally okay, but I think this book is then interesting from two separate angles: web accessibility and good technical writing. First, on the topic of accessibility, one of my favorite sections of this book is where Bram writes about how webfonts can harm the user experience if we’re not careful. By loading too many fonts, for example, and thereby slowing the speed by which the website is requested:

Which matters most to you—conveying your message, or conveying your message in the correct font? In almost all cases, communicating your message matters most. The web is not—or at least shouldn’t be—only for the privileged. Young, affluent people with perfect eyesight using modern devices with high-resolution screens on fast network connections constitute a small fraction of internet users. Don’t forget about the rest.

Later in the book, Bram continues this argument further:

We need to start thinking of webfonts as progressive enhancement instead of expecting webfonts to be a resource that is always available. The baseline experience of your site has always been, and will always be, just plain HTML and CSS. Webfonts enhance that experience. In fact, there’s no guarantee that visitors to your site will see webfonts at all. The Opera Mini browser is used by hundreds of millions of people, and it does not support webfonts. Without you doing a thing, those users are already excluded from using the webfonts you specify.

That means there are two possibilities you should design for: when webfonts are not available, and when webfonts are available.

Accessibility and caring deeply about how webfonts impact the overall design of a website does not make us a gang of old type snobs, instead it makes us good citizens of the web. By thinking about those technical implications we show our care for everyone that visits our small island on the web, and not only the people that happen to look just like us. And every moment that we ignore web accessibility is one where the web becomes more difficult to approach and where we all become a little more isolated from one another.

The second important note that I took away from this book is that technical writing, and writing about code in general, is extraordinarily difficult. It’s tough to know what to teach and when. Not only that but it’s tricky to keep enough concentration and focus to go through each step meticulously so that someone else can follow along easily. This subject leads back to accessibility I suppose, but I can only think of a handful of people that are really good at this sort of technical writing and Bram is certainly one of them."

"metaflop is an easy to use web application for modulating your own fonts. metaflop uses metafont, which allows you to easily customize a font within the given parameters and generate a large range of font families with very little effort.

with the modulator it is possible to use metafont without dealing with the programming language and coding by yourself, but simply by changing sliders or numeric values of the font parameter set. this enables you to focus on the visual output – adjusting the parameters of the typeface to your own taste. all the repetitive tasks are automated in the background.

the unique results can be downloaded as a webfont package for embedding on your homepage or an opentype postscript font (.otf) which can be used on any system in any application supporting otf.

various metafonts can be chosen from our type library. they all come along with a small showcase and a preset of type derivations.

metaflop is open source – you can find us on github, both for the source code of the platform and for all the fonts."

I have to be honest - I love the concept of Google fonts, but I find the execution to always be somewhat... lacking. I don't know. When compared to classics like Futura, Bodoni, Garamond - even Helvetica - they just fall short, and I rarely, if ever, end up using them.

Can you relate?

Again, I love the concept of Google font pairings: the fast download of cool fonts (and even cute fonts) from their high-speed library is great, and has brought far more unique, web friendly fonts and font pairs to the internet than ever before. They sort of broke us out of the standard web fonts and web safe fonts we were all chained down to a few years back of Arial and Verdana and even the Times New Roman font (remember those days? Can you believe they were just a few short years ago?).

But because of that feeling of something "lacking" - I've stayed away from Google fonts. Until now.

A while ago, my partner and co-founder of Reliable, David Tendrich, challenged me to do something about it.

"Make Google fonts work," he said.

And so that's how this post was born.

I wanted to create the best font pairings Google has to offer that even high-end agency designers would be tempted to use. I wanted to assemble Google font pairs that even I would have trouble turning down.

So I combed through Google's vast library and tested hundreds of font combinations, from their most famous and top fonts like the Roboto font, Railway font, Montserrat font, Lato font, Oswald font, Lobster font, and more, to more obscure, funky ones you may have never even seen before this post.

The wonderful Rijks collection

It was also about this time that I came across the Rijks Museum's online art collection. In short, it's a beautiful collection of both classical and modern art that is 100% royalty free and available for any use you'd like. (Can you say "aaaamazing?")

I took my favorite pieces from the Rijks collection and combined them with my Google font pairings to create a truly beautiful display of Google fonts that really work. We've also organized them by filters to help you find a font to fit that project you're working on right now. You'll find dozens of font pairings you can re-use time and time again for different clients and projects.

But that's not all!

I undertook one more challenge in this project: To express these font pairings through profound, time-tested quotes on design from world-renowned designers of all styles. So we have beauty in art, functionality in fonts, and wisdom in quotes.

If you too have had trouble finding great Google fonts and combinations, this might win you over to the Google Fonts Team like it won me over. Or maybe not! The beauty of design is that, at the end of the day, our own preferences and styles are what truly matter.

Modern: Feels like it was made for the 21st century, and wouldn't make sense in any other period. Typically clean, more on the minimal side, and great for projects that require a more polished feel.

Striking: Impact. Boldness. Weight. These font pairs reach out and grab you and pull you into their message.

Eccentric: Quirky. Odd. Different. These fonts communicate uniqueness in various ways. Great for personal blogs, companies in a crowded marketplace that need to be set apart, and more.

Classic: These font combinations feel like they could have existed for generations. They're reminiscent of classic, time-tested and weathered fonts that last. Great for projects that need to project confidence, reliability, style.

Minimal: These minimal font pairings say so much, with a whisper. They almost try to blend into the background and get out of the way to help you more purely take in the message. Clean. Concise. Polished.

Neutral: Some brands are like the friendly local baker who greets everyone with a smile. Others are more professional, cerebral. These neutral fonts are more on the cerebral side - conveying professionalism and cleanliness above all else. Think Helvetica, but for Google fonts.

Warm: For brands who are the "friendly local baker," these fonts are for you. They convey heart, creativity, openness. They say, "Come talk to me, let's be friends." Great for brands that have that personal touch.

So there you have it!

Beautiful fonts and combinations from Google you can use to fuel your personal and client projects. They're completely web safe fonts, and due to their vast use worldwide, I think it's safe to say Google fonts are the new standard web fonts.

(By the way, we've made this entire collection of Google font pairings into a downloadable PDF that you can easily reference at any time. You should see a small yellow tab at the bottom of your screen - click that to download the post now!)

I hope displaying them on top of various colors, with various beautiful works of art behind them, helped you envision how they might work in your projects. That was one of my biggest goals in creating this post.

An important lesson

That's actually a lesson that was greatly reinforced in me throughout this Google font quest - that how fonts are used are just as important, if not more so, than the fonts themselves.

I think often Google fonts are strewn across designs that are lacking the fundamentals of good design. They're the cool, hip thing to use - and as a result, so many people us them. But design is a spectrum ranging from bad to great, and as bell curves go, few designs are truly great.

By simple math, most designs using Google fonts need improvement. Perhaps that's where my initial bias against Google fonts came from. Design is something I take so seriously, and am so passionate about, that when I see bad or lazy design, it hurts. From seeing so much sub-par design riddled with Google fonts, I associated Google fonts with sub-par design.

A new perspective

But undertaking this challenge to create this collection forced me to see Google fonts from a new perspective. Namely, it forced me to throw away my previous conceptions and see them anew. When I did, I simply viewed them like I would anything else in a design - as an asset to be used and manipulated to achieve an end-goal.

When I had no choice but to make them work, I viewed them as something that actually "could" work. And that's where the creativity and magic began.

That leads me to another important lesson I became re-acquainted with in this process - that when we think something won't work, it won't work. And when we truly think it can, we really can make it work.

Strategies for choosing font pairs

I also wanted to talk about some of the strategies behind these Google font combinations to help you create even more of your own. Because while I have 50 here, I'm certain there are dozens more waiting to be made.

If you'll notice, there's a pattern to nearly every pair: The headline is very bold and impactful, and then the body font is very light and airy. This contrast creates a nice tension and context for the fonts. It makes it very interesting as you scroll. Our eyes and brains desire constant change and flux and small contrasts like this deliver.

Another reason the body fonts are very light and airy is that they have to be palatable and legible to the eye over the course of a long piece of text. If I throw a bold, impactful font at you for more than 10 or so words - your eye will go crazy. It's like talking on the phone with someone who only screams.

When you go from a louder headline font to a body font, there's almost a feeling of relief. The headline was a nice, momentary burst of excitement - but then the eye is relieved to handle something easier and less demanding.

Serif & Sans

In addition, still in line with that concept of contrast, I often paired a serif headline with a sans serif body, or vise versa. Again, this just emphasizes contrast and keeps things interesting.

It also takes things a step further and shifts the feel. Serif fonts tend to feel more grounded, conservative and calm. Sans serif fonts tend to feel more modern, daring, progressive. By paring the two together, you get a great balance that's interesting to the mind and the eye.

Work with what you (don't) love

Finally, in line with the attitude shift I mentioned above, in going from "Google fonts don't work" to "Let's make them work" - I purposefully chose some fonts I simply thought I'd never like or want to use in any context. If I looked at a font and felt like it was a "heck no" - I felt compelled to give it a try.

This is so important for the creative process. Often, without even realizing it, we confine ourselves to our creative comfort zones, which slowly shrink over time. But when we step outside and try something we thought we'd never like - we often have our biggest breakthroughs."

"On 31 March, 2017, Gilbert Baker the creator of the iconic Rainbow Flag sadly passed away. Mr. Baker was both an LGBTQ activist and artist, and was known for helping friends create banners for protests and marches. To honor the memory of Gilbert Baker, NewFest and NYC Pride partnered with Fontself to create a free font inspired by the design language of the iconic Rainbow Flag, the font was named 'Gilbert' after Mr. Baker. A preview version of the font can be downloaded for free in the download section."

"Greta Sans explores a multidimensional continuum of possibilities, going beyond the relationship between weight and width, dissolving the boundaries between display and text typefaces.

Greta Sans explores a multidimensional continuum of possibilities, going beyond the relationship between weight and width, dissolving the boundaries between display and text typefaces. It is a powerful toolbox capable of dealing with the most complex typographical situations.

Greta Sans comes in 10 weights which, combined with its four widths (Compressed, Condensed, Normal, Expanded), create a tremendous range of possibilities. Read more about the process in the Designing Type Systems article.

Continuous Optical sizes
Greta Sans is designed as a continuous optical size system. While the basic text styles (Regular) are spaced and optimised more loosely for use at small sizes, the surrounding extremes (Hairline, Black) are designed to be used as Display types, and therefore spaced and kerned tightly. The resulting spectrum then runs continuously from Display to Text to Display use.

Choosing Weights
Most widths of Greta Sans include 10 weights which give you precise control over the colour of the text. Choose adjacent weight to achieve an even colour Ⓑ, for example you can set body text in 12pt Light and notes in 7pt Regular. Skip weights if you are choosing style for the emphasis Ⓐ. In general, it is sufficient to adjust the weight by one degree, use SemiBold (and not Medium) to emphasise text set in Regular."

"When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as “tofu”. They are little boxes to indicate your device doesn’t have a font to display the text.

Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. Noto is Google’s answer to tofu. The name noto is to convey the idea that Google’s goal is to see “no more tofu”. Noto has multiple styles and weights, and is freely available to all. The comprehensive set of fonts and tools used in our development is available in our GitHub repositories."

[my favorite display font, the story = delightful, hard to believe I never bookmarked this before]

"OSP-Crickx is a digital reinterpretation of a set of adhesive letters.

The Publi Fluor shop was situated in the northern part of Brussels, Schaerbeek, and founded by the father of Madame Christelle Crickx who was a trained letter painter. In his day he is—it seems—the first to propose fluorescent colors for shopwindow signs. It proves so difficult to paint letters on site with that kind of unstable coating that he develops a technique based on vinyl that he fluo-colors and cuts by hand in the workplace, then sticks at clients shops. Around 1975, his health degrades quickly and his daughter is forced to step into the business.

[image]

Starting to cut letters with the rounded and skilled cardboard templates drawn by her father, Madame Crickx slowly morphs the shapes by analysing how typographic niceties confuse her non-trained clients and leads to bad letters placement. She progressively removes the optical compensation of rounded tops and bottoms, straightens sides, and attaches accents for less floating parts. Those moves add a very specific orientation to this otherwise quite common bold italic sans serif display typeface.

During about fifty years these craft lettres have spread across the windows of shopping streets, more and more, and after the closure of the shop in the early noughties, they seem to still hold their own to the assaults of vector vinyl cutting technology.

[image]

In 1996, Pierre Huyghebaert and Vincent Fortemps have just started to work for the cultural center les Halles de Schaerbeek. For a series of events linked to India, an interest to mix local and distant vernacular takes shape. Those letters spotted on Schaerbeek’s shopwindows years before seem to fit the job ideally. After a few wanderings in the streets nearby, the small lettershop at the bottom of the dull Avenue Rogier, shining with its fluo shapes, is finally spotted as the origin of these typographic waves… And the inside of the shop proves to be even more amazing.

First contacts with Madame Crickx follow, the first poster is typeset letter by letter, then Pierre Huyghebaert pays other visits and it becomes obvious that these letters deserve more than a one-time usage, as Madame Crickx’s work deserves more than simply buying some letters more. For the following Halles assignments, after a quick-and-dirty Fontographer vectorisation, the Crickx font is heavily used. This font is called the Crickx Rush in reference of the time constrains that characterize this kind of operation. When Jan Middendorp, then Editor of the Belgian fontshop magazine Druk, orders an article on the letters, it is the occasion for Pierre to try to investigate and understand better the process described herebefore. (Astonishingly, shortly before the magazine stops, a poll seems to have elected the article as one of the most favoured by the readers…).

[image]

When Madame Crickx follows the retirement of her postman husband, the studio Speculoos (where Pierre works) buys the whole stock of letters and dingbats and vinyle for a symbolic prize, stores it in their basement of Saint-Gilles but uses it for some of their funkiest windowshop displays. He ask Madame Crickx to cut lower-cases for her letters as with other accented and diacritics to cover more or less the Latin-1 codepage, by trying to give her just enough sample to distinguish the characters but not much to influence the way to draw them. As answers, she cut a completely new and fantasy set of letters (called the blobby in the pack)… After a discussion, she propose new lower-case, more in sync with the upper cases classical ones, but not sharing exactly the same low contrast. After years of sleeping on hard-drive and archives, in 2010, Ludi Loiseau and Antoine Begon uplift the work to redraw the outlines to produce a more complete and less trashy version (Regular), explore the non-italic more rare one (Droite Rush and Droite) and extend it with lower cases (SharkCut). Finally, the Crickx’s cabinet regains a better place at the new Constant Variable place, Rue Gallait 80, less than a kilometer far from the original shop place…

More :
– Pdf of the article in Dutch (translated by Jan Middendorp and French (original).
– Text by Femke Snelting

We are very happy to receive news from what you do or works you spot that use these fonts!
On est très heureux de recevoir des infos à propos de travaux que vous réalisez ou que vous remarquez qui utilisent ces fontes!"

"This special Input Sans font package was originally designed to replace the Helvetica-based system font on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Like Input, it is available free of charge for private and unpublished use."

"What do you call a circle that is wider than it is tall, has a flat or concave bottom, and is generally top-heavy? Did you guess “Ovoid”? Never heard of it? Don't worry, I hadn't either! The ovoid is an essential part of an art style called “Formline” that is used by native tribes all along the Pacific Northwest coastline ranging from Seattle in the south up to Alaska. In the book, “Learning by Designing”, Jim Gilbert and Karin Clark theorize that the unique shape of the Ovoid originated in the way a salmon egg looks when resting on a flat, dry surface.

Though I’d seen Formline art before, it wasn’t until I read Bill Holm’s seminal book “Northwest Coast Indian Art” that I examined the design language closely. That investigation resulted in this typeface, Salish."

"This past summer the producers of the award-winning television series ‘‘Homeland’’ had a problem. Principal photography for the fifth season was planned for Berlin but critical scenes were set in a Syrian refugee camp. The set designers contracted three Arab street artists — Heba Amin, Caram Kapp and Don Karl (a.k.a. Stone) — to provide a touch of Middle Eastern authenticity to the Western European backgrounds by way of some generic Arabic graffiti. In the frenzied final days leading up to the filming, it seems no one bothered to check the work. Only after the fact did the artists reveal they had bombed what some call ‘‘the most bigoted show on television.’’ Their tags were indeed political, just not in the way their employers had intended: They provided critiques of the program itself, such as ‘‘ ‘Homeland’ is a joke, and it didn’t make us laugh,’’ and, more bluntly, ‘‘ ‘Homeland’ is racist.’’ The artists asserted that their subversion was possible because in the eyes of the Western crew, ‘‘Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East.’’

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that in this moment of extreme anti-cosmopolitanism, where every form of other — from whatever perspective that other is rendered — is subject to suspicion, the mere presence of foreign writing is enough to evoke menace. Indecipherable texts are often metonymies for unknowable threats and unintelligible ideologies. Think of countless summer blockbusters where crates or tanks or missiles emblazoned with unreadable Cyrillic or Chinese characters portend certain doom. We tend to feel safe in our familiar alphabets. In turn, they link us to powerful traditions and communities. The origins of the little serifs on the corners of the letters you are reading here stretch back through the centuries, beyond revolutions, technological and intellectual, to the chiseled inscriptions on the monuments of ancient Greece and Rome. (Renaissance type designers, reviving Roman letterforms, prized the inscriptions on Trajan’s Column as the most perfect model.) Like all design objects, letters too are inherently ideological.

If the Roman letter recalls the chisel, Arabic is borne of the brush. Arabic calligraphy links back to ancient scripture and the origins of Islam. The Koran was revealed to Muhammad in Arabic, and the distinctively fluid form of writing is intertwined with the religion and culture of more than a billion people worldwide. That a writing system as lyrical and visually poetic as Arabic has come to signify something insidious — at least to Western eyes — is not just a little ironic. It speaks to the limitations of a technology-driven global community.

While the first printing presses arrived in the Middle East within decades of Gutenberg’s prototype — the quintessential disruptive technology — Ottoman bureaucrats allegedly outlawed any printing of Arabic text, by penalty of death. The mechanization of sacred writing bordered on blasphemy or at least cultural capitulation. By the time the draconian restrictions against printing were allayed in the 18th century — at least for secular texts such as mathematics and medicine — typographers faced a new challenge: the inherent complexity of Arabic. With 29 letters, each with two or four different contextual shapes, and thousands of possible unique letterform combinations, calligraphic Arabic simply wouldn’t fit the limited matrices of Western machinery that, in the intervening centuries, had developed to accommodate a limited system of Roman upper- and lowercase letters.

For centuries, traditional Arabic calligraphers had steadfastly refused to apply their skills to the creation of movable type, so the calligraphic never became fully typographic in the way, say, the handwriting of Medieval monks was transformed into standardized letters used on printing presses. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that several versions of a simplified Arabic alphabet were developed in collaboration with local calligraphers — underwritten by Western tech giants like IBM and Linotype angling to open up new markets — to work efficiently within the restrictions of Roman-based systems. Simplified Arabic was wildly successful, and is still used throughout the world, but in pruning and standardizing the alphabet, most of the elegant gestures of hand-brushed script were necessarily filtered out. Within the last decade, however, a cadre of highly skilled, mostly Middle Eastern designers, many of them autodidacts retrofitting Roman-based digital font authoring tools, are creating a fully typographic Arabic: one that merges the dizzying eclecticism of original writing systems with contemporary font production.

Prominent among them is Huda Abi Fares. Born in Beirut, she studied graphic design at RISD and Yale in the 1980s at the height of the Swiss modern influence. In 2004, she started the nonprofit Khatt Foundation in Amsterdam as a way of addressing the problem of cross-cultural type design and building a community of like-minded Arabic typographers. Today, the Khatt website showcases the work of more than 1,700 designers around the world. She has also started a project, ‘‘Typographic Matchmaking,’’ which pairs Dutch and Arabic designers together. Two alumni, the Slovakian Peter Bilak from the Netherlands, a world-renowned designer of Roman alphabets, and a Lebanese designer, Kristyan Sarkis, have since established TPTQ Arabic, a new type foundry focusing on the development of high-quality unified Arabic/Roman font families designed for global digital distribution. Think of bilingual contexts, such as the concourse of an international airport or signs on a highway, where an aesthetic coherence between writing systems is essential.

These nascent efforts point to a global modernization that doesn’t come at the cost of cultural specificity or aesthetic homogenization, but synthesizes calligraphic traditions to create new forms. Type designers spend their lives deep in the minutiae of reading and the hidden visual codes that permeate the fabric of our language. There is no form of design that is less noticed or more prevalent: Type touches everyone. Perhaps, just perhaps, these young designers can find a way to cross whatever chasm is dividing us. The task is increasingly urgent. We literally cannot read each other."

"N O R M A L T Y P E is designed to be a display font with no fixed shape. Version 1 came out as a piece of parametric typography, but we thought it was important to introduce motion in our application as soon possible. Hence why now, it comes with the same parameters as in the previous version, but also a ‘step sequencer’ so you can create animation loops to then export as animated GIFs! On top of that, we added a few new parameters such as ‘connections’ between characters, more punctuation and also a small window for text editing.

"OK, if you've watched you will say that he is a Dyslexic, so how can he think less of Dyslexics? Well, its confusing. He's a Dyslexic but really he's a missionary. He is not doing research, he is taking a personal experience and selling it to all as a "personal (and universal) savior." It is not just that he gets the science wrong - though he is right about "thinking in pictures" for many, but he is far off at thinking its about a visual processing issue... but that's not the problem. For many dyslexics reversals and upside-down letters is no issue at all. In fact, no matter how you might describe the underlying issues of reading issues, you will find a scatter plot across any graph.

It is like the colonial subject in 1910 seeing his or her personal issues solved through an interaction with a priest or a minister and assuming that interaction is what the world needs. And at the heart of this is desired ignorance, it is ignorance built of desire not to understand people, to actually believe that people do not count if they are not just like you.

Honestly, at a younger age, I almost made similar mistakes. I found myself arguing for Times New Roman for text, and for WYNN as way of reading. But fortunately, I noticed this absurdity on third person I talked to. He liked Helvetica and Kurzweil 3000, and he wasn't wrong of course, he was different from me. The next person I spoke to found no font useful, no keyboard useful. The next wanted Garamond at a certain size in a certain color combination, though color - within boundaries - had little effect on me. She wasn't wrong, she was different.

So I didn't develop a system for dyslexics, I worked out a way of thinking about choice, because I did not want to rate people according to their distance in similarity from me. I called this idea Toolbelt Theory and I still like it, because I think it respects the people around me.

So in a lifetime of being a Dyslexic, in 20 years of researching Dyslexia, I have learned that there is no best font for this, no best reading method, no best technology choice, no best color combination, no best anything... not even for me across a week or even some days, and I've heard that variability matters for others too. So we need to learn to choose from a menu of what works, to set defaults in browsers but to have other choices, to have a range of technologies.

I choose between 4 fonts, none are designed to look like bubbles being held to the ground because - well - that's not my issue. The computers the students have in our schools come with WordTalk and Balabolka and to in-browser Text-To-Speech system, and there are bookmark links to many others. My computers usually have at least five systems for TTS, my phone has three. But I never, ever, expect any other Dyslexic to choose the same combination.

I have learned that my experience is not "data" because I do not think those different to be outliers or "Children of a Lesser God." So please stop saying what Dyslexics need. And start talking about what choices humans need."

From the beginning of the project, we've had the fundamental question in mind of what this site is—which is to say, both what it's become (as regular readers know, a lot's changed here over time) and what we want it to be. Is it the website of a magazine? Is it a news site? Is it, as James Franco possibly once suggested, a blog?

The answers, we recognized, are all in one way or another yes. But we figured we'd try a thought experiment: What if we described TheAtlantic.com as a direct, dynamic, digital extension of our core identity in journalism—as a real-time magazine?

That seemed to us both authentic and aspirational: an idea that captured what The Atlantic has been doing in new media for years and a framework that could bring the right focus to rebuilding TheAtlantic.com now.

So here's what we did:

We created a site that makes a new priority of visual presentation, that offers a cleaner reading experience across digital devices, and that gives us the flexibility we need, both in our articles and on our homepage, to join the speed and urgency of the web with the noise-cutting and impact that have always been central to The Atlantic's ambitions.

The new homepage is composed of full-width modules each representing either one big story or a constellation of connected stories. We can move these modules up or down the page, allowing us, among other freedoms, alternately to lead with the urgency of our news coverage or the impact of a big feature, according to the needs of the moment.

It also allows us to give full play to the same urgency and impact beyond the top of the page. As you return to the site, you'll find different homepage modules in different orders with different kinds of stories in different combinations. What you won't find, we hope, is the impression of diminishing importance as you scroll down.

Neither should you find yourself disoriented. So rather than placing stories arbitrarily adjacent to one another, we're using each of these modules to display a single story or a group of stories that are in some way related. This approach is inspired by the emergent logics of scrolling and swiping in mobile media: The vertical axis of the homepage represents a logic of exploration (scrolling); the horizontal axis, a logic of connection (swiping). A good magazine should, after all, help us keep our bearings.

Our new article pages are likewise more visually engaging and flexible. We're using larger images, and better image integration, with a fuller range of options for bigger feature stories, as well as more controlled templates for quicker hits, which we'll sometimes need as The Atlantic moves fast in trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world.

We've thought about the logics of exploration and connection on the article pages too: Next to our stories (horizontally), you'll find links to related articles; below the stories (vertically), you'll find links to normally unrelated articles, or for that matter photo essays or videos, currently popular on the site.

Maybe most conspicuously, across TheAtlantic.com, we've replaced our old nameplate and navigation bar with a simple new flag bearing our logo, options to subscribe or search the site, and an expandable menu. This treatment is influenced by the way the logo is set on our monthly covers; the minimalistic integration of the subscription, search, and navigation functions is based both on extensive user testing and our guiding dedication to keeping signals high, and noise low, around our brand and our work.

Oh, and the typefaces are new. Hawk-eyed readers will recognize the display and text fonts, both Lyon, as the same ones we use in print."

"Move over Brangelina. And Bennifer. And Kimye, TomKat*, and Desilu. And sporks. And ligers. EVERYONE MOVE OVER! We're making room for the world's first genetically engineered superfont.

Presenting Comic Papyrus. You heard right — COMIC FREAKIN' PAPYRUS! Your two most favoritest fonts ever have FINALLY been smooshed together typographically, just as Darwin intended. Cross-bred. Cross-awesomified.

So stop wasting hours switching back and forth between your two old favorites, and just use your new favorite instead. Comic Papyrus combines the timeless rustic qualities from centuries past with the hilarious fun-loving wit of today's funny pages. It'll make you laugh (like a joke) and cry (like a mummy). Simultaneously!

How much would you be willing to pay for such a catharsis? Give me five bucks and I'll give you the last font you'll ever need."

"1. The ty­po­graphic qual­ity of your doc­u­ment is de­ter­mined largely by how the body text looks. Why? Be­cause there’s more body text than any­thing else. So start every project by mak­ing the body text look good, then worry about the rest.

In turn, the ap­pear­ance of the body text is de­ter­mined pri­mar­ily by these four ty­po­graphic choices:

2. point size is the size of the let­ters. In print, the most com­fort­able range for body text is 10–12 point. On the web, the range is 15–25 pix­els. Not every font ap­pears equally large at a given point size, so be pre­pared to ad­just as necessary.

3. line spac­ing is the ver­ti­cal dis­tance be­tween lines. It should be 120–145% of the point size. In word proces­sors, use the “Ex­act” line-spac­ing op­tion to achieve this. The de­fault sin­gle-line op­tion is too tight; the 1½-line op­tion is too loose. In CSS, use line-height.

4. line length is the hor­i­zon­tal width of the text block. Line length should be an av­er­age of 45–90 char­ac­ters per line (use your word-count func­tion) or 2–3 low­er­case al­pha­bets, like so:

abcde­fghijklmnopqrstu­vwxyz­abcde­fghijklmnopqrstu­vwxyz­abcd

In a printed doc­u­ment, this usu­ally means page mar­gins larger than the tra­di­tional one inch. On a web page, it usu­ally means not al­low­ing the text to flow to the edges of the browser window.

5. And fi­nally, font choice. The fastest, eas­i­est, and most vis­i­ble im­prove­ment you can make to your ty­pog­ra­phy is to ig­nore the fonts that came free with your com­puter (known as sys­tem fonts) and buy a pro­fes­sional font (like my fonts eq­uity and con­course, or oth­ers found in font rec­om­men­da­tions). A pro­fes­sional font gives you the ben­e­fit of a pro­fes­sional de­signer’s skills with­out hav­ing to hire one.

If that’s im­pos­si­ble, you can still make good ty­pog­ra­phy with sys­tem fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose times new ro­man or Ar­ial, as those fonts are fa­vored only by the ap­a­thetic and sloppy. Not by ty­pog­ra­phers. Not by you."

"There are over 650 Google Fonts available for free. But, pairing typefaces isn’t easy and many of those fonts don’t work for typical websites. Part of the 25x52 initiative, this collaborative, ongoing project offers inspiration for using Google’s font library.

All passages are from the Project Gutenberg transcript of Æsop’s Fables. All photographic images are from Unsplash.com."

"Aware that there is no such thing as total neutrality, this typeface explores how the absence of stylistic associations can help the reader to engage with the content of a text.

Neutral has been used for numerous projects from books, magazines to websites, and the feedback from these applications helped spur this release. Today, almost a decade after it was originally designed, we are proud to launch an upgraded version of Neutral — completely redrawn, freshly screen optimised, more neutral than ever."

"In addition to the film-specific typographic deconstructions on this site, I'm keeping track of all the times I spot classic sci-fi fonts in movies. What better way to start than with perennial sci-fi favorite, Eurostile?

Eurostile, and in particular its Bold Extended variant, has appeared in countless sci-fi settings over the years. It's got to the point where the very presence of Eurostile Bold Extended in an opening title card says FUTURE far more effectively than an expensive effects shot:

[image]

Indeed, Eurostile is such a quick way to establish a timeframe that whenever I see it in real life – which happens quite a lot in my adopted home of California – I assume I’ve been transported to some futuristic dystopia, where a local care center feels more like a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation:

[image]

Eurostile is most commonly seen in its Bold Extended form, but Regular, Bold, and Regular Extended sometimes crop up as well. I've captured (and tried to clarify) as many as possible below."

"The “Neuland Question” to which Jonathan Hoefler refers involves not just Neuland, a “display” typeface hand-carved in 1923 by Rudolf Koch (Plate 1), but also Lithos, another “display” typeface digitally created in 1989 by Carol Twombly (Plate 2). The Question can be put simply: How did these two typefaces come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them? The investigation of this question has four parts: first, an examination of the environments in which Koch and Twombly created the original typefaces; second, an examination of the graphic culture that surrounded African-Americans prior to the creation of Neuland through a close viewing of tobacco ephemera; third, an examination of the Art Deco (French Modern) style, the graphic culture most prevalent in the United States at the time of Neuland’s release; and finally, an examination of the ways designers use Neuland and Lithos today."

"MINUIT is an art-historical display face designed by Type-Brut Foundry in response to Marcel Broodthaers’ misprinted edition of Minuit, c. 1960. It features full sets of uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols. The MINUIT package contains an Opentype file, a specimen sheet, and a five seat copyleft license—it may be downloaded below. An enterprise license may be purchased at the current market value of Broodthaers’ Minuit."

"With Nocturno, Djurek continues the questioning of classification and tradition undertaken with earlier designs like Brioni. The influences of pen and brush shine through here, and Nocturno’s personality is largely Oldstyle. But it also shuttles fluently between early inscriptional forms and subtle modern gestures.

True to its name, Nocturno tends toward darkness. Color accumulates at the mid- and baselines via broad shoulders and substantial sculpted serifs. This massing draws readers’ eyes along and lends Nocturno an overriding sense of horizontality and momentum, an effect reinforced by compact extenders. Quasi-elliptical tittles placed slightly off-center also do their part to pull text rightward. But the horizontality never feels overbearing; relief comes in the form of steeply sloped head serifs, echoed by jaunty outstrokes at the baseline.

In any event, reading is never simply about moving forward. Reading, if one thinks of it as a continual negotiation between recognizing discrete shapes and clustering those shapes into familiar word patterns, is equally about pausing — as much a “vertical” activity, it seems, as a “horizontal” one. Djurek emphasizes the autonomy of individual characters in part through attenuated arches and through what he calls “recurvate inside contours”. The only potential drawback of these gorgeous interior curves is that, combined with the Clydesdale feet of ‘h’, ‘m’, and ‘n’ in the text version, they make for cramped quarters on the insides of forms; the counters of these letters risk appearing closed when rend­ered at extremely small sizes in less than optimal conditions. Even the best typefaces require careful use.

Nocturno is not a lighthearted face; it is a rolling, sober, and sensual one. But for all their heavy roundness, the text styles feel crisp and precise, on paper as on screens, down to fairly small sizes. Medium contrast, generous x-height, slightly oblique stress, subtle curves combin­ed with modest angularity, moderately open apertures — all work together to encourage immersive reading.

The incisive display cuts are more than simply refined versions of their sturdy text counterparts. Nocturno Display is its own thing. It sheds massive, almost clunky concave slabs for pointy shards; the graceful tapering of the stems almost pushes the display version into flare serif territory. And, particularly in the display, the face’s overall heaviness is leavened by finely attenuated joining strokes, providing the sort of contrast often associated with modern types (and, of course, scripts). One can imagine the brighter display cuts working remarkably well for headlines in just about any context. In fact, at the very moment I was writing this, Stephen Coles licensed the webfonts to use for Typographica heds.

Perhaps it is no longer possible to call Djurek a new or up-and-coming designer, but he consistently innovates. That he is scrappy and independent seems undeniable. Shortly after founding Typonine, Djurek told John Boardley that his ambition was to create “a nice foundry (nothing big), where I will publish some of my fonts”. As the eight-year-old company enters maturity with no signs of slowing down, Djurek appears to have achieved his goal."

"Among the thousands of features on your smartphone, one you’ve probably never thought about is which fonts it uses. Typography is involved in almost everything we do on our devices — the emails we send and receive, the texts we compose, the tweets we scroll through — yet to most of us, letters are just letters, numbers are just numbers. We might pick Garamond over Comic Sans for a cover letter, but on a phone, who cares?

Google, though, is paying attention. It’s spent years trying to create the perfect fonts for Android devices, a sprawling ecosystem that includes small phones, big tablets, and everything in between. And now, as Google is installing Android into cars, TVs, and watches on your wrist, the company is attempting an audacious task: making a typeface that looks good on all of them.

“Typography is kind of the skeleton. It’s the unsung hero,” Matias Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, said in an interview this week. "We’re trying to give people one logical, consistent system.”

Google’s efforts to perfect a universal typeface began in 2005, when it acquired a small operating-system-maker named Android. Two years later, it released Droid, a family of fonts designed by type-design firm Ascender specifically for use on Android devices. Until Droid, many fonts used in mobile applications were holdovers from the desktop age — Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, and other household names. Droid looked markedly better on smartphones than those typefaces, but it had problems of its own. Droid fonts worked best on small, low-resolution screens like the ones on early Android phones. But on the larger, high-definition screens that were introduced in later models, the fonts looked off. The bold letters were too blocky, and some of the non-bold letter forms, which had been designed for low-pixel-density screens, looked insubstantial and oddly spaced in high resolution. "Droid struggled to achieve both the openness and information density we wanted," Duarte later wrote in a Google+ post."

…

"Roboto wasn’t an immediate hit. Some type geeks dismissed it as a “Frankenfont,” a pastiche that borrowed heavily from other popular fonts, including Helvetica, the famous font that inspired a 2007 documentary. “Roboto is a Helvetica rip-off. It’s Google’s Arial,” tech blogger Jon Gruber wrote. Typographer Stephen Coles labeled it “an unwieldy mishmash,” and said, “This is not a typeface. It’s a tossed salad.” And though others were more complimentary – Glenn Fleishman wrote that "Roboto pricks at your sense of the familiar at first, but then, like a person you see passing in a crowd that you believe is a friend, and then on fully facing realize is a stranger, the font asserts its own identity" — Roboto was never truly embraced by the small community of designers who pay close attention to things like exit angles and ball terminals. (Google isn't alone in this; Apple's choice to use an existing typeface for iOS, rather than create its own custom typeface, has also come under heavy scrutiny from designers.)

Unlike pre-digital fonts, which were essentially set in stone after being finished, Google got to keep working on Roboto. And in subsequent editions, the typeface got a face-lift. The uppercase B got a little slimmer. The comma was made less angular. “The old model for releasing metal typefaces doesn’t make sense for an operating system that is constantly improving,” Duarte said. “As the system evolves over time, the type should evolve along with it.”

With its latest operating system, Android L, Google has made the most dramatic update to Roboto yet. The changes are part of Google's new, somewhat inscrutable "material design" initiative, and unless you study fonts, you might not notice the difference. But under the hood, there’s a lot going on."

…

"Unlike most innovations in computing, typeface design doesn't succeed by grabbing your eye. In fact, if you notice the changes in the new version of Roboto, Robertson and his team have probably done something wrong. The goal of a good font is to be silently useful, to improve a readers's experience without calling too much attention to itself. But if you notice, in the coming months, that your Moto X or your Samsung smartwatch suddenly starts to feel a little sleeker, and your emails and tweets get a tiny bit easier to read, it might be the new Roboto at work behind the scenes."

"Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum today announces a new name and graphic identity, custom typeface and website to accompany the expansion of the museum, which will open to the public on November 14. Designed by Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and team, the bold identity establishes a flexible branding system for the museum built around a new custom typeface, Cooper Hewitt, created by Chester Jenkins of Village.

Opara and his team worked closely with Cooper Hewitt and Jenkins to develop the identity. Located in the historic Andrew Carnegie Mansion in New York, Cooper Hewitt is part of the Smithsonian Institution, the group of 19 museums and galleries administered by the U.S. government and popularly known as the “nation’s attic.” In a first, the new Cooper Hewitt identity has been conceived as a design that truly belongs to the people: The identity also exists as a new typeface that will be made available free to the public, who are encouraged to utilize it in their own designs. The font has also been acquired for the museum’s permanent collection.

“We are spreading good design by making our elegant new typeface, Cooper Hewitt, available as a free download on cooperhewitt.org, as well as collecting it as an important example of the design process,” says Cooper Hewitt director Caroline Baumann. “We look forward to seeing how the public uses this new design tool in their lives.”

Opara also helped develop the museum’s new name. Formerly the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the new name replaces “National” with “Smithsonian” and eliminates the hyphen, simplifying the brand while emphasizing its heritage.

Iconic, engaging and highly functional, the new Cooper Hewitt wordmark forms a perfect rectangle that can easily be scaled, positioned and colorized without losing its strong visual presence. There is an intriguing relationship between the words “COOPER” and “HEWITT” in the new identity: Set normally, the words are different widths. Here, each character has been tailored to help define the overall typographic frame. The wordmark has been expressly designed to serve as the basis for a wide variety of uses.

“Cooper Hewitt’s new identity plays it straight, with no play on visual or theoretical complexity, no puzzling contradiction or ambiguity, no distracting authorship,” says Opara. “Function is its primary goal, and ultimately the logo is important, but not as important as what the museum does.”

In some applications the new Cooper Hewitt wordmark will be accompanied by the signature “Smithsonian Design Museum,” which uses the Smithsonian’s existing identity, designed by Chermayeff and Geismar in 1997 and set in the contrasting serif typeface Minion Pro.

The Cooper Hewitt typeface is a contemporary sans serif with characters comprised of modified geometric curves and arches. The font evolved from a customization of Galaxie Polaris Condensed that Opara originally commissioned for the identity. Jenkins designed a new, purely digital form built on the structure of Polaris. The new font is redrawn from scratch, using the existing forms of Polaris as a rough guide.

Cooper Hewitt will be available as a free download as installable fonts, web font files, and open source code on cooperhewitt.org. Widely used across all Cooper Hewitt media and collateral—from object labels to the museum website—the unique font will become closely associated with its namesake.

Opara and his team have also redesigned the Cooper Hewitt website with a modular format that complements the physical transformation of museum and serves the expanding digital needs of the institution. Optimized for mobile devices, the design makes Cooper Hewitt’s activities, collections, programs and content easily accessible to visitors. The site, currently in beta, is being implemented in WordPress by Matcha Labs, in conjunction with the museum’s in-house digital team. Opara and his team have also created an extensive collateral systems for the various museum departments, including membership, education and the shop.

Pentagram’s Michael Gericke and his team are currently developing signage and wayfinding based on the new identity, to be introduced with the museum’s reopening in November. The revitalization of the museum includes a major expansion and renovation developed in collaboration by Gluckman Mayner Architects and executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle, with reconfigured galleries designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Opara and his team are collaborating with DS+R on the exhibition design and labeling system for the galleries, which utilize a digital collecting device for a unique user experience."

• “Photograph” for a unitary exposure v. “image” for everything else. I call push-broom and whisk-broom–acquired pixels photos in my head sometimes, and feel no shame. Satellite imagery is heavily processed before it looks like what we see, but so is a conventional photograph: film chemistry and Bayer demosaicing are quite elaborate and, often, less controlled and less eye-mimicking than many of the composites that are, to the pedant, mere images. (And oh, the long history of photomanipulation! Pull up some high-res scans of old negatives from the Library of Congress and sometimes you can see brushwork where something was fixed up. Ansel Adams was dodging and burning with what we would now think of as a heavy hand.)

• Jacket v. coat. I think one is longer? I don’t care.

Gaps and being willing to say no. It’s so admirable when someone has decided not to do something important but unnecessary. I know people who buy only one kind of each item of street clothes, people who refuse to follow the news, who never drive, who will not talk with anyone the least bit trollish, who teetotal without a particular medical or religious reason, who won’t get a smartphone, and so on. I can’t remember someone telling me one of these things that didn’t make me happy to hear. I think the value in these nos is mostly in the very small scale, where it lets people talk with themselves and find their own edges. I can see this as a political act but it helps to understand it as personal first."

…

"Michael Yahgulanaas has been doodling in the margins of Hokusai. For a sense of what he’s up to, here he is punching a little humanity through a smotheringly dumb TV profile."

…

"The archaeologist Beverley McCulloch’s description of the heavy-footed moa, quoted by Nic Rawlence on RNZ’s Our Changing World, which incidentally is a paragon of science broadcasting (the interviewer, Veronika Meduna, used the word “poo”, ★★★★☆, and, instead of playing dumb, asked questions showing that she was trained in a relevant field, ★★★★★), just as their Spectrum is a paragon of general-interest broadcasting, and so on. If you share a desire to enjoy Radiolab and The Moth and such but just can’t, I commend RNZ to you. Without ever using the words, they connected the new kiwi bird cladistics study that’s been making the rounds with pressing issues of the anthropocene. Something good and strange is in New Zealand’s water lately."

"Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful oldstyle typefaces.

There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties like oldstyle figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like. In fact, a lot of time is spend developing free knock-offs of ugly "standards" like Times and Helvetica.

Crimson Text is inspired by the fantastic work of people like Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. We hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse."

"An edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein laid out using characters and glyphs from PDF documents obtained through internet searches. The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.

The beginning of the book is comprised largely of Arial, Helvetica, and the occasional Times New Roman. As you might expect, these are by far the most common fonts used in documents.

By page 46 and 47, things have progressed to a lot of Arial Bold and Times Italic.

In the 200s, commonly used script fonts, as well as much more obscure faces are beginning to appear.

As we reach the end, the book has devolved significantly: non-Roman fonts, highly specialized typefaces, and even pictogram fonts abound.

Process. For each of the 5,483 unique words in the book, we ran a search (using the Yahoo! Search API) that was filtered to just PDF files. We downloaded the top 10 to 15 hits for each word, producing 64,076 PDF files (some were no longer available, others were duplicates). Inside these PDFs were 347,565 subsetted fonts.From those fonts, 55,382 unique glyph shapes were used to fill the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text.

PDF Fonts. This project started because of a fascination with the way that PDF files contain incomplete versions of fonts. The shape data is high enough quality to reproduce the original document, however only the necessary characters (and little of the font’s “metrics” that are used for proper typographic layout) are included in the PDF. This prevents others from extracting the fonts to be used for practical purposes, but creates an opportunity for a curious Victor Frankenstein who wants to use these incomplete pieces to create something entirely different."

"N O R M A L T Y P E is designed to be a display font with no fixed shape. Version 1 came out as a piece of parametric typography, but we thought it was important to introduce motion in our application as soon possible. Hence why now, it comes with the same parameters as in the previous version, but also a ‘step sequencer’ so you can create animation loops to then export as animated GIFs! On top of that, we added a few new parameters such as ‘connections’ between characters, more punctuation and also a small window for text editing."

"Stetson is an experiment in geo-historical typography. The single-weight face is drawn from a very small sample of 19th century hand-drawn letterforms, found within an old photograph in a shed in Weymouth, Massachusetts. The sample, “E. H. Stetson and Co.,” is surrounded by a display of shoes. Not far from where the photograph was found is the actual Stetson Shoe Co. factory building, which operated in Weymouth from 1885 until 1973.

Stetson Shoe Co. is an indelible part of Weymouth’s history, having employed most of the community throughout much of the 20th century. Shoe manufacturing was an important source of socio-economic strength and pride for the town. The significance of Stetson is firmly embedded in the identity and language of Weymouth, even as its relevance vanishes. Its meaning today is ghost-like and elusive; it haunts photos, stories and family histories.

The Stetson typeface is in a kind of spatio-temporal duet with its own history: it locates itself within the original photograph (late 19th-century New England), as well as in the shed on January 11, 2012. The letterforms vibrate in time and space.

Stetson was created for Weymouths, a 12-volume book project commissioned by the 2012 b-side Arts Festival in Weymouth, England (part of the Maritime Mix / London2012 Cultural Olympiad by the Sea). Production by Thomas Jockin.

Stetson is available here for free download under an SIL Open Font License / Version 1.1 [FAQ].

1. enjoy what you are doing
2. get paid
2. don't work with assholes
4. only accept work that challenges you and you can build up a relation to
5. don't work 'for' people but 'with'
6. be honest to your client and yourself
7. keep on searching and exploring
8. quit when you don't enjoy it anymore

I like to invest in relationships rather than money and success"

[Presentation outline]

"1. Who the **** is Eike König? [0:07:47]
2. How to create a creative space
3. Bauhaus is dead, long live Bauhaus. [0:30:44]
4. Is it magic? [0:45:36]
5. How can you reach excellence? [0:51:28]
6. Create your own future [0:59:39]
7. Don't fear the future [1:14:34]"

[The Hort Band]

"1. collaboration is essential
2. the Hort band is in a state of constant evolution
3. repetition dulls creativity
4. the moment is more important than the documentation"

Written from scratch in Python with scalability in mind.
The editor allows full scripting access to objects and interface.
The application is a platform for drawing and modifying
typefaces and much more...

"Frameworks make decisions for you about how to organize, structure and design a site. Pattern libraries don’t separate styling and markup, making them tough to use in a truly modular fashion. We weren’t satisfied, so we made a thing that doesn’t do that.

Typeplate is a “typographic starter kit”. We don’t make aesthetic design choices, but define proper markup with extensible styling for common typographic patterns. A stripped-down Sass library concerned with the appropriate technical implementation of design patterns—not how they look."

"Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time. But there’s no reason Courier has to look terrible. We set out to make the best damn Courier ever. We call it Courier Prime." [See also: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime ]

"There are over 400 typefaces in the Google web fonts directory. Many of them are awful. But there are also high-quality typefaces that deserve a closer look. Below are examples of these typefaces in action. Click the examples to get the typeface from the Google web fonts directory."

"For the first time in the entire history of Unicode standard, the full encoding range for dingbats (U + 2700 – U + 27BF) is now covered by a complete, contemporary quality font. Erler Dingbats is a spin-off of the distinguished FF Dingbats 2.0 family, and was designed as a special collaboration between designers Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe."

"Open-Dyslexic is a new open sourced font created to increase readability for readers with dyslexia. The typefaces includes regular, bold, italic and bold-italic styles. It is being updated continually and improved based on input from dyslexic users. There are no restrictions on using OpenDyslexic outside of attribution.

Download the newest package, and additional dyslexia typefaces in the downloads section."

"I believe that the world of type design and typography has benefited greatly from Adobe’s contributions in the arena of type technology. In adding to this legacy, I am proud to announce that today marks another milestone as Adobe makes yet another type resource freely available by releasing the Source Sans Pro family as our first-ever open source type family."